Top Ten Takeaways: A Fresh Look at Marketing for Online Newspapers
Kathy Schwartz, Vice President of Audience & New Product Development at The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., contributed this top ten list based on NAA's recently released report, "Smart Strategies: A Fresh Look at Marketing for Online Newspapers."
The recent report NAA published about online marketing for newspapers is a quick read, but just in case you still can’t find the time, here are ten points I found interesting:
- There are seven suggested SEO marketing strategies, but one would be pretty easy to do: rewrite your headlines to include important keywords and place words.
- Example: “City council approves new voting procedure” should be “Wilkes-Barre City Council approves new voting procedure.”
- Optimize images to include giving meaningful names to the files and give long description tags. You might consider using the caption as the alt tag.
- Lots of newspapers are employing paid search to drive traffic – that means they buy keywords either around a specific topic or geography or area.
- There’s an article in the May 7 issue of Business Week about this very practice and how it was used for the Virginia Tech tragedy.
- Use the Google ToolBar and Alexa to scope out your competition and to pick the best keywords to buy against them.
- The case study about the Houston Chronicle outlines how they improved their rank on Google News from 110th in 2004 to 19th at the end of September, 2006.
- The Christian Science Monitor used YouTube to promote a multimedia packaged called “Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story.” Page views topped one million on the first day of the online series and went up from there.
- Hint: They used an optimized press release to generate publicity about the series and get the press talking about it before launch.
- A multimedia marketing campaign paid off for Hampton Roads’ CareerConnection Web site with online video, banners, links, local events, print, TV, radio and bus advertising.
- Bakotopia.com got its start through viral marketing including posting fliers around town, e-mail blasts and word-of-mouth.
- It helps to have a cool platform that lets users do what they want – for free.
- Free sites attract audiences that some advertisers will want to be in front of – but create unique and custom solutions for these advertisers so they have more options that simple banners and text links.
- I need to take a class in SEO – based on the nuggets in this report, it’s clear to me that search engine optimization needs to be a priority if we are to be found online by new audiences.
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